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Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

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Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#141

Post by xorcist »

anderspitman wrote: post #38
mateus1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think you can replicate that with 10 lines you have no idea what Google Analytics is used for.

I'm ashamed to admit that I use GA on my blog to essentially count page views. The other information is interesting but mostly unused (by me). I would be far better served by a tool or service handling server logs (any recommendations?). But GA is 0 friction, so it's what I picked up back in the day. I suspect there are a lot of people in this boat.

Many of the common web log analyzers are a bit long in the tooth.

I've have used GoAccess for a while now and is mostly happy with it. It's fast enough and can generate pretty good looking static html which is mostly what you want for those simple use cases.

A side effect of processing log files is that you can freely try software on historical data.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#142

Post by anderspitman »

TomGullen wrote: post #130
anderspitman wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My CloudFlare stats show multiple times as many hits as GA. I'm guessing it's not handling bots/spiders or something.

We put this down to people with JavaScript disabled or ad blockers. CF does filter bot traffic but will capture all hits as it’s tracking through network requests. For us it’s around a 35% increase in what GA reports.

For me CF is showing 3x GA unique visitors. Though that's almost all HN traffic, so I suppose it's certainly possible that 2/3 HN users have blockers.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#143

Post by anderspitman »

xorcist wrote: post #141
anderspitman wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ashamed to admit that I use GA on my blog to essentially count page views. The other information is interesting but mostly unused (by me). I would be far better served by a tool or service handling server logs (any recommendations?). But GA is 0 friction, so it's what I picked up back in the day. I suspect there are a lot of people in this boat.

Many of the common web log analyzers are a bit long in the tooth. I've have used GoAccess for a while now and is mostly happy with it. It's fast enough and can generate pretty good looking static html which is mostly what you want for those simple use cases. A side effect of processing log files is that you can freely try software on historical data.

Do you have a recommendation on log format for GoAccess? I run a lot of custom services with no nginx etc in front, so I'll have to figure out the logging myself.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#144

Post by divbzero »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #80
pixelbath wrote: post #67

I see a lot of suggestions for free or open-source analytics packages, but I would refrain from recommending anything you haven't personally used. I've tried to separate myself from Google in various ways, and one of those was to replace Google Analytics with open source software. I tried several; they're all either non-functional out of the box, or require significant time investment to even start approaching Google…

I’ve used Piwik (Matomo) and the open source version seems to work pretty well, but I’ve never had any particularly sophisticated use cases.

I also use open source Matomo [1] self-hosted with a simple LEMP stack but there is also a hosted option [2].

[1]: https://matomo.org/docs/installation "Installing Matomo On-Premise"

[2]: https://matomo.org/pricing/ "Matomo Pricing"

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#145

Post by StreamBright »

ElFitz wrote: post #36
StreamBright wrote: post #25

I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. It took roughly 2 weeks but it is worth it since do not leak customer data and we have much tighter control over what we collect (no PII except the source ip that gets hashed in the process).

FYI, if your setup relies on API Gateway, you probably could use VTL / Mapping Templates to directly send from API Gateway to Kinesis and skip the lambda altogether, like some do for dynamodb See https://hackernoon.com/serverless-and-lambdaless-scalable-cr... And https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/using-amazon-api-gatewa...

Woo thanks! I did not know it. I might re-architect the workflow to have this.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#146

Post by StreamBright »

macinjosh wrote: post #54
StreamBright wrote: post #25

I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. It took roughly 2 weeks but it is worth it since do not leak customer data and we have much tighter control over what we collect (no PII except the source ip that gets hashed in the process).

> I have created a simple workflow using AWS Lambda + Kinesis + S3 to track our customers and not to have any 3rd party dependency. Except for each of the 3 components you listed that make up your system. They are 3rd party dependencies,

I meant no 3rd party dependency on storing customer data that requires extra legal work in GDPR land. Maybe we need to include AWS in that though. I need to look into it how cloud vendors are 3rd party in that sense. Is there a difference between Google Analytics vs. storing data on S3 even if we do not collect PII?

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#148

Post by marcosdumay »

davidarkemp2 wrote: post #79
marcosdumay wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on Firefox with uBlock Origin.

I'd check your filters - EasyPrivacy has -google-analytics- blocked in the URL I got to it by adding the following filter @@||dev.to/goatandsheep/stop-donating-your-customers-data-to-google-analytics-191?i=i$xhr,1p

EasyPrivacy was enabled.

My Firefox was a minor update earlier than the one on the sibling comment (72.0.1). It has updated now, and the site claims that my connection is down on my machine too.

Now that I have seen the message... It's a funny thing for a web page to claim.

Re: Stop donating your customers' data to Google Analytics

#149

Post by MadWombat »

winthrowe wrote: post #95
MadWombat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you link me to the FTP vs. Dropbox discussion? I am curious. I haven't used either for years and the implication seems to be that there is a profound difference, so I wonder what it is.

This is the 'infamous' original thread in question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

That is cute, thank you.
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